German stage and film actress Margit Carstensen, the heroine of iconic films by influential director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, has passed away at the age of 83, according to her agent on Friday, June 2.
Long-suffering Carstensen passed away on Thursday in a hospital near Hamburg, according to the agent.
She was best known for her performance as Petra von Kant in Fassbinder’s 1972 all-female film “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant” — a predatory narcissist who receives her comeuppance through an affair with a younger woman (Hanna Schygulla).
Her performance earned a German Film Award.
Two years later, the Kiel-born actress would star in Fassbinder’s drama about an oppressive marriage, “Martha,” followed by a series of films investigating traditional gender roles, including “Chinese Roulette” and “Women in New York.”
Carstensen had a successful collaboration with unconventional director Christoph Schlingensief, who cast her as Magda Goebbels in “100 Years of Adolf Hitler” during her theatre career, which saw her perform on the most prestigious stages in Germany and Austria.
In 2004, the same year Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, he directed her in a production of Elfriede Jelinek’s “Bambiland” at Vienna’s renowned Burgtheater.
Her most commercially successful film was 1999’s “Sonnenallee,” a satire about 1970s life in authoritarian East Berlin.
Recently, she appeared alongside Schygulla and Irm Hermann in the immensely popular German television crime series “Tatort,” in which they depicted three elderly women who claim they were morally impelled to commit murder.